On the one hand, Mr. Krauthammer suggests that more aggressive psychiatric
intervention might make a difference; and on the other he states that Roseburg shooter Christopher Harper-Mercer "had no psychiatric
diagnosis beyond Asperger's."

First, apparently Mr. Krauthammer missed the memo that Asperger's is no longer a
psychiatric diagnosis - it was voted out of the latest version of
the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM-5), published in May 2013. Many people
don't realize that so-called mental disorders are voted in or voted
out of American psychiatry's "bible," not scientifically discovered
or undiscovered. Another prominent example of a so-called mental
disorder going the way of the dodo by popular vote of American
psychiatrists is homosexuality, first included in, then excluded
from the DSM. Referring to the DSM-5, Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), declared,"The
weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart
disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a
consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective
laboratory measure... Patients with mental disorders deserve
better... That is why NIMH will be re-orienting its research away
from DSM categories." (
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml
)

American psychiatry's inability to determine with scientific clarity
what does or does not constitute a mental disorder is compounded by
the fact that the United States is one of only two countries in the
world, New Zealand being the other, that allows direct-to-consumer
advertising by pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma does such a
good job of disease-mongering -- often inventing then selling a
disorder and creating then funding corresponding "grassroots"
advocacy groups (aka "astroturfing") in order to sell their drugs --
that it makes it difficult to take back a mental disorder once it
has been invented and sold to the American public.

The first and most obvious flaw with the wishful thinking that more
aggressive psychiatric intervention might make a difference (read
prevent) mass shootings in America is that American psychiatry
cannot reliably define what a mental disorder is, let alone agree
upon and recommend its efficacious treatment.

Second, Mr. Krauthammer can't possibly know for a fact that Mr. Harper-Mercer's only
psychiatric diagnosis was Asperger's. This is a classic example of
jumping to conclusions, based on a report of out-of-context online
posts by a relative. It has also been reported that Mr.
Harper-Mercer's online alias was "Lithium_love." It should be noted
that if in fact Mr. Harper-Mercer was taking lithium, that drug is
indicated for Bipolar Disorder, not Asperger's (or Autism Spectrum
Disorder/ASD). So if Mr. Harper-Mercer was prescribed lithium, he
was either diagnosed with Bipolar, or the drug was prescribed to him
off-label. To be sure, off-label prescribing, as well as
polypharmacy (ie. prescribing multiple drugs), is rampant in
American psychopharmacology, a symptom of the shoot first aim later,
trial and error prescribing habits of an industry that has a tough
time defining mental illness, much less deciding on how to
effectively treat it. The reality is we will probably never know
the extent of Mr. Harper-Mercer's psychiatric diagnoses, or the
name, number and doses of the psychotropic medications prescribed to
treat them.

The suggestion that the aforementioned mass shooters were not
receiving psychiatric care, and if only they had access to needed
psychiatric care then perhaps the tragedies might have been averted,
is misleading. The problem is that in America -- where doctors are
paid handsome consulting fees by pharmaceutical companies to pitch
their drugs to other doctors, and where the pharmaceutical industry
spends approximately $230M per year to influence Congress --
psychiatric care has become synonymous with psychotropic drugging.

The earlier choice of the words "in recent history" was not
accidental, because this tragic mass shooting phenomenon has only
been recent in America's history, since the clock tower shooter
Charles Whitman (Valium, Dexedrine) killed 16 people on the
University of Texas campus. In an upcoming documentary, Dr. Jean
Stolzer points out that "guns
have always been in this country since the first Europeans
stepped on American shores." (see also
https://leoniefennell.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/the-systemic-correlation-between-psychiatric-medications-and-unprovoked-mass-murder-in-america2.pdf
) Likewise, President Obama has pointed out: "The United States
does not have a monopoly on crazy people. It's not the only country
that has psychosis. And yet we kill each other in these mass
shootings at rates that are exponentially higher than any place
else. Well, what's the difference?" [NOTE: Most people missed the
fact that Mr. Obama's above response was to a question about mass
shootings posed via Tumblr by Nick Dineen, residential assistant to
UC Santa Barbara mass killing victim George Chen - whom the coroner
later determined was killed with a knife, not a gun, like two other
of Elliot Rodger's victims. Mr. Obama's response and Mr. Dineen's
question can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDVFs2l6-fo and the coroner's
findings that Mr. Chen, Weihan Wang, and Chen Hong each died of
multiple stab wounds can be viewed here:
http://www.sbsheriff.us/documents/ISLAVISTAINVESTIGATIVESUMMARY.pdf
. This demonstrates how jumping to conclusions based on initial
media reports can be problematic.]

Indeed, what's the difference? Neither guns or psychosis are new or
unique to America. So what has changed?

What has changed in America and what is unique to our country is the
alarming increase in the number of Americans taking psychotropic
drugs, which carry FDA-mandated label warnings of serious
psychiatric adverse events, including suicidal and homicidal
ideation.

Similarly, while Britain was banning antidepressants for kids due to
an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior associated with
the drugs, the FDA threatened the same medical reviewer, Dr. Andrew
Mosholder, with an internal investigation, and prevented him from
presenting his findings that the drugs doubled suicidality in kids
at a Pediatric Advisory Committee meeting (
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-108hhrg96099/html/CHRG-108hhrg96099.htm
).

According to the DSM-5,"Between 7 percent and 25 percent of individuals presenting with a first episode of psychosis in different settings are reported to have substance/medication-induced psychotic disorder."

Big Pharma invented and has successfully marketed the unproven
theory that mental illness is the result of a chemical imbalance in
the brain. Swallowing this marketing theory hook, line and sinker,
Americans are also swallowing psychotropic pills -- and shoveling
them into their children's mouths -- at rates dwarfing other
nations.

Ironically, there is evidence that psychotropic drugs derive their
action precisely by creating a chemical imbalance in the brain,
according to former NIMH Director Dr. Steven Hyman (
http://search.proquest.com/openview/5610c361a22516dda3dc72bb25f5371e/1?pq-origsite=gscholar
). Psychiatric medications, he wrote, "create perturbations in
neurotransmitter functions." The brain must then compensate to
adapt to "alterations in the environment." Chronic administration
of the drugs, he added, cause "substantial and long-lasting
alterations in neural function."

Referring to his own LSD trip, immediate past President of the APA,
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, wrote: "My [LSD] trip did produce one lasting
insight, though--one that I remain grateful for to this day...I
marveled at the fact that [if] such an incredibly minute amount of a
chemical...could so dramatically alter my cognition, the chemistry
of the brain must be susceptible to pharmacologic manipulations in
other ways, including ways that could be therapeutic." (
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dj-jaffe/book-review-shrinks-the-u_b_6924810.html
)

We, as a nation, are reaping the fruits of this historically
unprecedented, massive-scale experimentation on the chemistry of the
human brain.

When most mass shooters were taking psychotropic drugs, it's an
insult to what's left of our collectively numbed intelligence to
suggest that more psychotropic drugs are the answer to mass
shootings. If psychotropic drugs were the answer, then the
astronomical increase in Americans' use of psychiatric drugs should
have led to a dramatic decrease in the number of mass shootings, not
an increase. Experience shows that more mental health treatment
with psychiatric drugs will lead to more mass murder, not less.

Take, for instance, the case of Bradley Stone. Not unlike Charlie
Gordon in Flowers for Algernon, Mr. Stone might once have been
considered a darling example of the shining success of mental health
diversion courts and Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) of the kind
advocated by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) in his proposed Helping Families
in Mental Health Crisis Act (HR 2646) - that is, until Mr. Stone
shot and chopped up seven people, before poisoning himself with the
Risperdal and Trazodone he was prescribed and then stabbing himself
( http://www.montcopa.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/2128 ). Or
there's Spc Ivan Lopez-Lopez who in the months preceding the second
deadly Ft. Hood shooting spree voluntarily met with a half dozen
Army mental health providers at Ft. Bliss, Ft. Leonard Wood, and Ft.
Hood on ten occasions, dutifully refilling prescriptions for
psychotropic medications ( http://www.pharmabuse.com/blogs/98 ).

At the very least, we know psychotropic drugs do not prevent mass
killings, since toxicology results for most of the aforementioned
dead mass shooters revealed the prescribed drugs were still in their
blood. Moreover, the FDA has received 765 reports of homicide as a
side effect of psychotropic drugs, many of which were multiple
homicides. Just as the now well-established link between
antidepressants and suicidality, which prompted a black box warning,
was once covered up, the extent of the temporal link between
psychotropic drugs and violence toward others has been concealed
from the American public. Now, thanks to a recent Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against the FDA, we're
obtaining the relevant adverse event report records, and they will
be made public for the first time.

U.S. taxpayers should not spend more money on mental health programs
promising to prevent mass shooting tragedies, because such
undoubtedly costly programs, by the very nature of their promise,
would be fraudulent. If anything, Congress should investigate
whether psychotropic drugs, which have been demonstrated time and
time again as being incapable of preventing homicide, may actually
be living up to their scary label warnings.

The guns versus mental health debate is a red herring. They are two
sides of the same coin - emphasis on coin, as in money. The gun
lobby and the pharma lobby are a marriage made in heaven (or, more
aptly, hell). We're hearing from the gun lobby that more guns would
help victims protect themselves from psychotic mass shooters. We're
hearing from the pharma lobby that forced mental health treatment
with psychotropic drugs, which the mass shooters were already
voluntarily taking, would prevent mass shootings.

The only lobby seemingly letting a crisis go to waste is the
entertainment lobby. We haven't heard that more violent video games
and movies would prevent mass shootings -- yet.